This Year In Videogame Blogging: 2015

We’ve made it to the end of 2015. Another year has set itself into the history books.

We have gone through the archives of the past year in out endeavor to put forth a creative snapshot, our thesis, if you will, of what the year was all about. To that end we have created a compilation of the most important, most memorable and most representative critical pieces of 2015 in the hopes it can give some idea of what the year was all about. Critical Distance is proud to present the 2015 edition of This Year In Videogame Blogging!

Culture Blogging

Art is a reflection of the culture that surrounds it. The direction that a medium takes is in advance or following behind the direction that culture is presently. To best understand that direction look to the people creating it, experiencing it and living it.

At Boing Boing’s Offworld, which relaunched earlier this year, Gita Jackson said loudly and firmly, “We are not colonists.” The minority voices now being heard did not just appear out of thin air, Jackson reminds us — they were always here, just not always heard. Zoe Quinn, one of those voices, articulated the growing movement of #altgames as the movement where those voices have coalesced as a punk like movement.

In a 6-part video series, Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios asked those who find themselves in certain harassment groups, “Why are you so angry?” Elsewhere at The Psychology of videogames, Jamie Madigan had Dr. Jeffrey Lin of Riot Games’ Player Behavior Team on his podcast to talk about toxic player behavior.

At Kotaku, Evan Narcisse gathered together a number of black critics and creators — Austin Walker, Shawn Alexander Allen, Natasha Thomas and Catt Small — to discuss in a letter series “Videogames’ Blackness Problem.” Samantha Blackmon of Not Your Mama’s Gamer followed up on Narcisse’s piece to discuss another “blackness problem” outside of stereotypes and representations.

This year also saw Anna Anthropy announce that she hates her game dys4ia. Or rather, she wrote that she hates what it has become, an emblem of “Empathy Games” that allow supposed allies a shortcut without having examined themselves or learned anything.

In “Not Safe For Work (Or Anwhere Else),” Todd Harper talks about the body politics of the gay community on display in Robert Yang’s “dick pic simulator” Cobra Club. (Content Warning: predictably, sexual imagery!)

Heather Alexandra explores the subtext, the meaning of interpretation, and the discussion of author/audience relationships which run through The Beginner’s Guide (video). At Medium, Amsel von Spreckelsen criticized The Beginner’s Guide as a piece of modernist art as a form it mostly acclimates itself well to.

Michelle Ehrhardt goes back to the original Assassin’s Creed, which she labels as the only truly revolutionary title in the series. The game takes its titular “creed” and basic plot from the 1938 novel Alamut, a statement against the rise of fascism in Italy, and manages to morph the game into an interrogation of the war on terror.

Gaby of Girl From The Machine looked at “Queerness in Metal Gear Solid” series and the problematic ways it presents its queer characters as punchlines or vessels of villainy.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is an apocalypse outside of context, so says Yussef Cole, as the world of that series is stuck in a kitsch version of the 1950s that ignores, if not erases, the race politics of that era. In doing so, the world of Fallout hasn’t moved passed them, just presents the world in “bland universal terms.”

Laura Dale was hit hard by Life is Strange‘s second episode in which she witnessed a character’s suicide, using it as a launching-off point to discuss where responsibility might lie in confronting players with potentially traumatic scenes. (Content Warning: frank descriptions of suicide.)

Austin Walker looked at how Darkest Dungeon deals with mental health. He noted that it while it isn’t faultless, it’s still beyond many other games in depicting mental illness, and above all it executes well on a deep seated anxiety, that “we live in a world that is willing to ruin people for a little net gain.”

Writing for Paste, Maddy Myers wondered if disaster games should be fun. Elsewhere, the Extra Credits crew castigated Hatred (video) for not being about rage or violence, as it advertised, but about pure and simple sadism.

Anita Sarkeesian praised The Scythian (video) from Sword & Sworcery EP in Feminist Frequency’s new series examining positive depictions of women in games.

Several critics explored older games as they looked forward to the future. Kill Screen’s Chris Priestman studied the original Lara Croft and how she became an expression of Riot-Grrrl feminism of the 1990s. Noah Caldwell-Gervais examined all 11 PC Call of Duty titles (video) and how the series has evolved over the last 12 years. And Nate Ewert-Krocker performed a close reading of Final Fantasy Tactics and how its main character comes to recognize their privilege.

Brendan Vance’s longform critique of “The Ghosts of Bioshock” covered the real history of Wounded Knee, Manifest Destiny, and the Boxer Rebellion, versus how their shadows are felt through Bioshock Infinite‘s compromised vision. Samantha Blackmon and Alisha Karabinus came together to in a video for Not Your Mama’s Gamer about the art and animation style of Cuphead and its invocation of blackface tropes, however unintentional.

Over at Memory Insufficient, John Brindle looked at the nature of consent in a community of roleplayers in World of Warcraft who dictate property rights. Elsewhere, Adarel explored the politics of City: Skylines with regards to its education system and how pumping money into it fixes all of a city’s problems.

In the last few months, Videogame Tourism ran an 8-part series “Demystifying MOBAs” by Eron Rauch, examining in close detail the game design of several of the big games in the genre: League of Legends, DOTA2, and Heroes of the Storm.

Kate Cox examined the music of Dragon Age: Inquisition and how the subtleties of repeated themes and alterations of pieces can highlight both aspects of the world’s culture and otherwise hidden story beats. Bruno Dias reviewed Emily is Away for ZEAL, focusing on some often-overlooked story elements and how they uncritically reproduce an abuser’s playbook.

First Person Scholar brought us Mark Johnson’s analysis of bullet hell game Warning Forever and how its design inverts many aspects of the genre and plays purposefully with others. Finally, Kill Screen’s Will Partin did much more than simply review Prison Architect, instead tackling its large-scale failure to either model or critique the U.S. prison system and its human rights abuses.

Industry Blogging

Games are an artistic form, but they are also a business. Likewise, there are many facets to games writing, from analysis of specific games to coverage and analysis of the people who make them.

‘Big indies’ may bring more money to more Kickstarter projects than before, but in a piece for Polygon Katie Chironis explained the hidden cost of the new strand of “indies” using the service as a proof of interest to show to investors.

Gita Jackson joined other critics in lamenting the loss of P.T., which was pulled from the Playstation Network Store earlier this year following the cancellation of Silent Hills. And while losing P.T. was terrible, Felipe Pepe took the Gamasutra community to task for its selective attention span, calling the interest in this specific title a self-servicing crusade for a high profile game while ignoring an industry-wide problem.

Critic-turned-professor Maggie Greene lamented the loss not of a game, but of the body of writing generated around games. For example, remember Spore and how groundbreaking and culture-shattering it was? Chris Suellentrop remembered, or at least, he remembered the hype and how much it resembles that currently passed around for the upcoming title No Man’s Sky.

Chris Bateman revisited the once-truism of the forty hour game and how it has changed from a situation of game-as-product to an exercise of retention. Elsewhere, Owen Grieve of Midnight Resistance mused on a post-post-gamer era and how the industry has changed with the march of time.

Some criticism is about a game as a whole and other times it’s about a single element abstracted out. Some times that abstraction isn’t tied down to an example, but to an understanding of game design itself. Both critics and developers can lend a unique perspective to design.

Shortly after The Beginner’s Guide‘s release, Brendan Keogh theorized about two ways of thinking about making a game: design in which the player is at its center, versus making a fine-tuned machine where the player is the least reliable part of it.

“Why are we so afraid to walk?” asked Miguel Penabella at Kill Screen, as he tried to define and understand the genre — or rather the movement — of the “first person walker.” It’s a term that he admits is imprecise, yet still better than the proposed alternatives.

In her essay “Against Flow” Lana Polansky jump-starts a conversation about the “flow” convention of “traditional design,” claiming it numbs subjectivity and side-steps politics in art. Cameron Kunzelman pushed Polansky’s “ideological container” concept further by exploring flow’s origin as a vague term slowly stripped of that vagueness, turning instead into a conservative moniker. Heather Alexandra continued the train of thought left by the previous two and proposed a more interesting, sublime state of engagement with games.

Gita Jackson brought up the 60fps debate and why videogame producers should not invoke cinema too casually, as though film weren’t itself beset by multiple framerate standards. Katherine Cross, writing for Gamasutra, argued videogames should forget all comparison to cinema and instead look to opera as their closest cousin.

Lana Polansky also tackled Clint Hocking’s famously misappropriated term “ludonarrative dissonance,” by formalizing and explaining a much simpler and clearer model: coherence and incoherence.

Speaking of Bioshock, Salavatore Pane criticized its “Tyranny of Fun,” an attitude of game design he says always impacts how we try to make or appreciate works outside the box. Elsewhere, on the subject of games like Dark Souls, Austin C. Howe explained the concept of “Republican Dad Mechanics” (audio), their current use in videogames and their limiting and off-putting structure.

And Claris Cyarron for The Arcade Review looks to the paintings of Mark Rothko and how videogames can evoke the same emotions in their constructed spaces.

Publications

Beyond the internet article, there is a longer form of criticism taking the form of books and magazines. Over the past few years these enterprises have grown and such publications continue to be a presence.

Boss Fight Books published most of its second season of books this year. Notable among them were: Ashly and Anthony Burch’s look at Metal Gear Solid, in which they both celebrate and take the game to task in ways it hasn’t matured; and Nick Suttner’s book on Shadow of the Colossus, which explores both the game’s influences and the game as the influencer in turn.

Lastly, prominent scholar, author and former Blogger of the Year recipient Brendan Keogh has finished his PhD thesis on intersections between games and bodies and has released it into the wild.

From Our Contributors

As has been the case from our site’s inception, Critical Distance prides itself on drawing its contributors from the community, writers as enmeshed in the ongoing discourse as those we cover. We’d like to take a moment to highlight some of their work from this year from outside of C-D.

First up, our senior curator and editor-in-chief Kris Ligman delivered a talk at Queerness in Games Con earlier this year, on why “Sex is like Dark Souls” — in that it may not be for everybody and is not the be-all, end-all of human experience.

Our This Month in Let’s Plays curator and Blogs of the Round Table co-chair Lindsey Joyce looked at Kentucky Road Zero for Haywire Magazine and saw the player’s role not so much that of an actor, but as the director “Pulling The Strings” of the experience due to the necessary “thinking from a higher level order of story.” And fellow co-chair of Blogs of the Round Table Mark Filipowich wrote about several videogame cities and the novel Thirteen Cents.

Two members of our team also retired earlier this year: Lana Polansky and Cameron Kunzelman. These changes occurred before work on this list began, so we’ve included them elsewhere in this roundup. We’re thankful for all your contributions to the site, Lana and Cameron!

Blogger of the Year

And now to announce our Blogger of the Year, I cede the floor to Senior Curator Kris Ligman:

It has become customary in these end-of-the-year retrospectives to highlight the contributions of a particular writer, or writers, who helped define the year’s critical discourse.

In the past, the honor of “best blogger” has gone to a newcomer or standout writer who went from standing near the periphery of our reading of games writing to take center stage in an ongoing, ever-evolving critical discussion. Each year, these breakout talents have helped to raise the discourse to new heights. Previous years’ winners include Brendan Keogh (2012), Liz Ryerson and Samantha Allen (2013), and Austin Walker (2014).

This year, we are proud to name Gita Jackson as our Blogger of the Year.

Gita Jackson touched off 2015 by delivering one of its most seminal pieces, a manifesto for the recently-relaunched Offworld. Her column on games and fashion for Paste Magazine is not only refreshingly unique in a discourse often obsessed with graphics and gameplay, Jackson also approaches her readers — and her listeners on the Match 3 podcast — with a characteristic insight and charm that leave the rest of us feeling like we’re slacking off in our own critiques.

We congratulate Gita on her many contributions to 2015’s discourse on games and we hope you will join us in celebrating and supporting her future work!

And Auld Lang Syne

In looking back upon this past year, we saw both critics and designers look to the past, ruminating on the paths we took and in some cases wondered about those that we did not take, or took and then abandoned.

But most of all, this year was a massive collective effort to recognize there was not a single path walked to the present. Many histories — of developers, of players, of critics — intersect in creating ‘now.’ And knowing that, we can move forward with a plan and an understanding of the large, complicated, tangled mess of a collective history behind us, rather than a single straight line. That is 2015. That is what I think this retrospective illustrates.

I thank all my colleagues at Critical Distance for putting in their time and expertise, not just into this feature, but into the site as a whole. I thank my editors, both here and elsewhere. And I thank you, our readers. See you all next year.

We will resume our weekly roundups in the second week of January. Please continue to submit your suggestions for This Week in Videogame Blogging to our email or @ mention our Twitter account.